The wife and son had been shot in the head, each with a single bullet. The engineer had died from a shot to the chest. The precision of the killings, coupled with his failure to find any bullet casings after the raid, led Omar to believe that his cousin was murdered either by US special forces or by an intelligence agency. The sole survivor was the couple’s younger son, aged six, whose upper torso was riddled with puncture wounds from grenade shrapnel... Last week General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of Nato troops in Afghanistan, responded to President Hamid Karzai’s call for a ban on night raids by publicly ordering his troops to curb their use. Uruknet: Survivors of family killed in Afghanistan raid threaten suicide attacks. Thaindian News: Afghan government claims coalition troops killed 12 civilians.

The US invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003. Then-President George W. Bush and top administration officials told the American people Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to the US, had concealed weapons of mass destruction and helped plan the 9/11 attacks. But that was a lie. AWIP/Maidhc Ó Cathail: Who’s to blame for the Iraq war? TomDispatch: Washington’s Cult of Narcissism and Iraq.

As William K. Black said a year ago, the government's entire strategy now - as in the S&L crisis - is to cover up how bad things are ("the entire strategy is to keep people from getting the facts"). Paul Krugman and others pointed out that Geithner has been trying to artificially prop up asset prices, but that such a strategy cannot succeed. As I've pointed out numerous times, the stress tests were a total sham, with a pre-ordained passing grade for the banks. As I've noted repeatedly over the last couple of years, the government has allowed the giant banks to hide their liabilities and maintain dizzying amounts of leverage by using off-balance-sheet gimmicks.

Madrid has warned that, if continued at the current rate, the Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied Palestinian lands would bring about the annexation of the entire occupied territories. Spain's Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos cautioned that the advancement would claim the entire Palestinian territories in the West Bank, should the current rate of acquisition survive for another two years, AFP reported on Saturday. The comments came after the Israel interior ministry approved the construction of 1,600 housing units for Jewish settlers in Jerusalem (al-Quds). Tel Aviv has been denounced for seeking insidious annexation of the territories under the guise of refurbishing the Jewish residences, resettling the Arab dwellers and promoting tourism among other "self-serving" excuses.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has led Israel into a serious crisis in relations with the United States and to a collapse in peace talks with the Palestinians just when they were to be resumed. A year after he took office, it is apparent that his government's policies, which made it top priority to populate East Jerusalem with Jews, is leading to Israel's increasing international isolation and threatening its key security interests in the name of an extreme right-wing ideology.

The crisis began over the humiliation of Joe Biden with the announcement, in the middle of the U.S. vice president's visit, of the approval of construction plans for 1,600 new apartments in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo. Netanyahu thought that excuses in the form of "I didn't know," "Bureaucrats tripped me up," and "From now on I'll watch what they do" would suffice for Biden to forgive the insult to his and America's pride. AFP: Israeli settlement action 'an insult': Obama aide. PressTV: Israel lobby [AIPAC] warns against row with Israel. + US ponders denying Israel arms needed for Iran war.

[Editor's Comment:] Denying Israel arms is not a very realistic idea. -After all, Israel controls the American government, directly and indirectly. If it were not so, this public humiliation of the US by Zionist Israel would not have happened. The shitty little state will get all that it wants and more. Not only that, it has the power to force the US to attack Iran. In all likelyhood, this is what will happen.

InvestmentWatchBlog: Does anyone else find it odd that Israel is the most visited foreign country by US politicians?

“We are shocked and stunned at the Administration’s tone and public dressing down of Israel on the issue of future building in Jerusalem,” Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director, said in a statement.

This is a slick little piece of propaganda. How does it work? First, show images of the world trade center collapsing and inform the audience that full body scanners will be installed at "Boston's Logan Airport where two of the flights hijacked on 911 originated." Second, state that the scanners will better detect devices such as the one that was found in the underpants of the Christmas Day bomber. Next, ask whether the scanners are really necessary and then show footage of a high ranking TSA official testifying before Congress with the answer!

Two government advertisements that use nursery rhymes to warn people of the dangers of climate change have been banned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for exaggerating the potential harm.

The adverts, commissioned by Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, used the rhymes to suggest that Britain faces an inevitable increase in storms, floods and heat waves unless greenhouse gas emissions are brought under control.

The ASA has ruled that the claims made in the newspaper adverts were not supported by solid science and has told the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) that they should not be published again.

It has also referred a television commercial to the broadcast regulator, Ofcom, for potentially breaching a prohibition on political advertising.

The rulings will be an embarrassment for Miliband, who has tried to portray his policies as firmly science-based. He had commissioned two posters, four press advertisements and a short film for television and cinema, which started appearing in October last year in the run-up to the Copenhagen climate talks.

They attracted 939 complaints — more than the ASA received for any advertisement last year. The deluge posed problems for the ASA, which is not a scientific body, so it decided to compare the text of Miliband’s adverts with the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Based on that comparison, it ruled that two of the DECC’s adverts had broken the advertising code on three counts: substantiation, truthfulness and environmental claims.

At least two mass graves containing dozens of people killed by the Nazis have been found on property used by the Austrian army, government officials said Friday. An army statement suggested some of the remains may be that of U.S. pilots shot down and imprisoned during World War II.

A night raid carried out by US and Afghan gunmen led to the deaths of two pregnant women, a teenage girl and two local officials in an atrocity which Nato then tried to cover up, survivors have told The Times. The operation on Friday, February 12, was a botched pre-dawn assault on a policeman’s home a few miles outside Gardez, the capital of Paktia province, eastern Afghanistan. In a statement after the raid titled "Joint force operating in Gardez makes gruesome discovery", Nato claimed that the force had found the women’s bodies "tied up, gagged and killed" in a room.

Zionist "tourists" watch bombs drop on Gaza